App Store at the fork: can unknown games break into the top?

Yesterday, a wonderful article by Eric Johnson was published on Re\Code, in which he tried to answer the question, what should small and young teams do in the mobile market, can their games enter the charts today? We offer the full version of the article in Russian.

The first few years of the iOS App Store were, to use one of Silicon Valley's nastiest buzzwords, groundbreaking. Gaming companies that have not yet managed to leave their mark on the industry, like King (founded in 2003) and Rovio (founded in 2005), or did not exist at all, like, for example, ZeptoLab (2009) and Supercell (2010), have become real giants earning billions of dollars.

However, it is less clear whether the next King and Supercell will be able to climb the charts of the matured market. Installation prices continue to rise, and companies that already have money and visibility spend it on retaining the required number of installations and purchases.

A good example is Supercell, which earned $5.15 million a day in February of this year (according to screenshots published by a Syrian hacker). The Finnish company currently has three apps in the Top 10 grossing iPhone App Store apps: Clash of Clans, Hay Day and the recently released Boom Beach. The success of the first two titles paved the way for the third.

King also has three games in the Top 11: Candy Crush Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and Pet Rescue Saga. According to the company's IPO filing, it spent $376.9 million on marketing in 2013.

These empires won't sink easily, said Keith Katz, co-founder of the Execution Labs mobile gaming incubator. Games need "very good viral channels" built into the project already at the time of launch. The winners are those companies that can afford to test virality in their projects even before launch, or who have tight wallets or already launched popular titles.

Without money or effective testing, some games try to get to the top by spending money to buy paid installations. But at GDC, Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky said that market leaders can spend so much on acquiring users that the strategy of relying on the purchase of paid installations can be very risky for young companies.

"You just can't rely on the flywheel of paid purchases, because there will always be someone willing to work at great cost," Laski said. – "As Jeff Bezos said, your margin is my opportunity."

One alternative, the conversation about which is regularly raised in discussions between developers, is the feature editing of projects by the editors of the App Store, which increases downloads. But even here the situation may change. The Wall Street Journal reports that EA and ZeptoLab negotiated with the App Store for the exclusive placement of Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Cut the Rope 2 in the store for two to three months in exchange for significant game features in the store.

Even if, as the article suggests, games do not directly affect device sales, the benefits of such deals are obvious to both sides. The developer gets more downloads on a better monetized mobile platform, and Apple gets the appearance that its store has a better and larger assortment than its main competitor, Android. However, this is not very good for small teams who want to get promoted, but who do not have the hotly anticipated sequel of any hit in their storerooms.

However, Cupertino often promotes paid visually bizarre games from independent developers, despite the fact that the dominant business model in the App Store is free-to-play. This month, the store launched an Indie Game Showcase to draw attention to exclusives from Simogo, but Gamasutra reports that the positive effect of the new collection quickly faded away.

So independent game teams have three options left if paid installations and features don't work: forming alliances with other developers to cross-promote each other's projects; working with a publisher to get high-quality marketing and high visibility in the App Store; or simply lowering the bar.

Katz says that a good strategy may be to refuse to gain high positions in the charts, where the game will have to compete with Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. The mobile user base is quite large today, there is money and not in the highest positions.

"I think the money is flowing down into the charts," he said. "And I don't think it's always been that way."